"Why should a message be "padded" (and not just with zeroes) before being encrypted or signed using RSA?" I just happen to know this one. I know effective developers that don't. This is not 'basic' information.

"What is the expected run-time of quicksort? What is the worst-case run-time?" Who cares? Call the sort method on your array class, call a sort function. Done. I don't need to know this for everyday things.

"Name and describe the four states in MESI cache coherence." This is 'basic' knowledge? Maybe if I wrote a kernel in school, and if I did, I certainly don't remember the details of dealing with cache coherence 25 years later. I'm not a kernel developer now. Nor are a Very Large Percentage of developers in the real world.

"Which of the following two functions is faster, and why? Assume that the C code is translated into machine code in the obvious manner, without optimization." Again, I just happen to know this one. But the "without optimization" almost makes the exercise silly. As your employer, I'd want to know you have the analytical skills to find the bottleneck in the code or to discover the compiler bug whose optimization is causing problems.

"Explain the difference between a mutex and a read-write lock." Sorry, I'm using a higher-level construct. GCD from Apple, go routines in go ... do I 'fail' this question because I don't have to remember this from 15 years back?

More importantly, you don't know what you don't know. If you don't have something in memory, even though that knowledge is readily available on the web, you probably won't notice an opportunity to apply that knowledge. That said, while I can answer these questions, they are pretty specialized knowledge. It's is a common phenomenon to think that the specialized area you work in is a big part of the world because you spend so much time in it. People should not feel bad about not knowing the answers to these questions. A web developer doesn't need to know any of these things, and he would be able to come up with web development questions that would be equally hard to answer if don't happen to be in that area (e.g. In which browsers is css-property-foo supported? or: what is faster, setting innerHTML or inserting a new elment into the DOM?). Even within the area of computer science, the author is asking specialized questions about hardware, security and algorithms. If it was about machine learning, type systems, and parsing you'd have a completely different set of questions. Or it could have been about computer graphics, compiler optimization, human computer interaction, and programming languages.